Pivoting a Hardware Startup into an Open-Source Platform | Zilsel-Invent
INTRODUCTION: Hard Times for Hardware Startups After thirteen years, I faced the reality that my startup project, launched back in 2013 , did not achieve commercial success. I invested immense effort and years of continuous learning to master electronics and programming just to bring my idea to life. From my perspective, it is exceptionally difficult to break into the Arduino ecosystem as an independent hardware designer and manufacturer from Serbia. The barrier is not a lack of design knowledge or engineering skill, but rather the Arduino Community – a massive ecosystem counting over 30 million active users . This statistic, based on official Arduino IDE downloads and active cloud platform users, is a clear testament to their market dominance. Arduino has become the standard in primary schools, high schools, universities, and maker workshops. Competing with such an established ecosystem with a new commercial product is a monumental challenge. The market is saturated with similar ...